


All You Who Changed Your Stripes Can Wrap Me In The Flag

by ladyalix



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alderaan, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Kylo Ren and Rey Are Related, Mother-Son Relationship, Rey Solo, Trauma, unholy amalgamation of eu and disney canon, vampire weekend inspired
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 20:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15420918
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyalix/pseuds/ladyalix
Summary: And so far away his wife hangs up. Han’s unsettled, on edge. He often has trouble picking up on the finer tunes of things, like his wife, but even he can tell something is very, very wrong. Even the sign-off: usually Leia’d say something cheeky, the time-honored I know or something discreetly bawdy - but I love you too was too sincere, not guarded enough; it was as if she was scared she would never be able to say it to him again.Multi-Chapter, Post-ROTJ/Pre-TFA, AU





	All You Who Changed Your Stripes Can Wrap Me In The Flag

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is my first SW/Hanleia work in over a year, and I'm super excited to publish it. The title comes from "Hudson" by Vampire Weekend; you don't neccesarily need to listen to the song to enjoy and understand the fic, but it does help set the mood. Significantly AU in that Rey is a Solo and Han and Leia are still very much in love.

 

“Ben,  _ mijo _ , come here, help me braid my hair. Like old times.”

Her son looks half contemplative, half distrustful, in that funny fourteen-year-old way where he doesn’t quite seem to fit his suddenly lanky frame, where he doesn’t seem to feel comfortable with anyone, even his parents. He looks, to her, the same as always, though; he has her dark coloring, her husband’s harsh, rugged good looks - good looks obscured a little by the gawkiness of puberty. He is too skinny. She wonders if Luke is feeding him enough - 

“I… I shouldn’t.” He’s staring at the wood floor, the same wood floor he used to play with his toy ships on while she looked over reports in the kitchen…

“Why? Oh, no attachments,” she murmurs. She thinks it’s a little bit unfair of Luke to impose that kind of orthodoxy on her son - he’s only a child, after all, and children need at least a little love, even if they’re padawans. Besides, she thinks to herself, Luke never paid much attention to the  _ no attachments _ requirement of Jedi knighthood, not if his reputation at every gay bar on Coruscant was to be believed.

Ben looks almost apologetic as he nods in agreement, and Leia feels her heart break a little bit. The doubts that creep into her mind, especially after Han’s been complaining about the training, have been occurring more frequently lately. She feels like something bad will happen.

“I guess braiding your hair won’t hurt,” he says. “You have to look nice for the office, right? I don’t see why you don’t just cut it short, like Mon Mothma. Would save you an hour in the morning.”

“An Alderaanian woman can  _ never  _ be seen without her braids,” Leia says in mock offense. She sounds like her aunties, she realizes, and smiles softly at the thought of them - Celly and Tia and Rouge and Deara. They are all gone now, dust and ash and sacrifice, like the rest of Alderaan. 

“Are you thinking about Alderaan again?” Ben asks very softly. Sometimes Leia wonders if it’s a Force thing, the way he can tap into her emotions so deftly. He doesn’t read her thoughts like Luke does; it’s a more visceral, more primitive kind of telepathy, closer to a heightened sense of empathy and oneness between mother and son. 

“Yes, baby,” Leia responds. She pats the bed. “You’re very good at telling.”

Ben sort of grunts, clearly uncomfortable. But he shuffles over to the bed and crouches next to her, begins the familiar motions, separating Leia’s curtain of thick deep brown hair into six sections. 

“You think about it a lot, don’t you,” he mutters, trying to understand, Leia thinks, in his surly teenage way, but a pang in her chest, an involuntary wince, must let him know that his suggestion was not the comfort, the helpful question he wanted it to be.

“Not as often as I should, if I’m being honest,” she answers truthfully, bowing her head so Ben can’t see the pain in her eyes and hoping he doesn’t sense it, anyways. “It hurts too much. Especially the first few years, during the war, there was always something to think about. And then the senate, and you and Breha happened, and there was more work to be done, more thoughts to occupy myself with. But - lately…” she trails off, unsure of how to phrase it. “I have a lot of time to myself. To think.”

“Sorry,” says Ben awkwardly. “You didn’t have to send us to Uncle Luke, though, you know. I mean… Rey’s only  _ five _ .  It’s a little barbaric, don’t you think? I mean, we live in the modern world, but the Jedi still seem to think it’s medieval times, when people were just shipped off to monasteries and apprenticeships and stuff.” 

Leia feels another pang in her chest - this time, she suspects, it’s guilt. 

“Are you happy with Uncle Luke,” she murmurs. “I don’t want either of you to stay if you’re unhappy.”

“I don’t think I’m necessarily unhappy,” says Ben. “I’m just not… happy, either.”

Leia sighs. “Have you talked to Dad about it?”  
“Not about the dreams, specifically - it would only freak him out. But he’s wanted to take us back home for a while. He says he’ll be home later this month and we can all _discuss things then_.”

“Honestly, Ben, and you know I don’t say this often - “ she smiles tightly - “ perhaps your father is right. He’s always had a better head on his shoulders than Uncle Luke and I have. I didn’t know Breha’s been having nightmares again. Did she tell you?”  
Ben looks uncomfortable. “Kind of. She was waking up crying a lot, in the girls’ dormitory, and I’d get these… messages from her. Force messages, I guess, like the kind you have with Uncle Luke.”

“It’d be nice if your Uncle Luke communicated with me a little more often about my daughter being miserable with him,” Leia says scathingly. She pauses. “Sorry. Don’t tell him I said that.”

“I won’t,” Ben agrees, too stiff and too serious. “But Rey  - “ he pauses. “The stuff in her dreams, the stuff she’s told me, or let me see, rather… it’s nothing she’d ever have encountered in her life. Not without some kind of Force memory, or some kind of… transgenerational trauma.”

“How do you know about transgenerational trauma?”

“I read about it, once. They say survivors of genocide and other large-scale traumatic events like that pass their own PTSD down to their children. Supposedly, descendants of Alderaanian survivors in Coruscant are three hundred percent more likely to receive psychiatric treatment than the city’s general population.”

“Three hundred percent, huh,” Leia says, a little distracted. Ben can rattle off facts and statistics like a droid, but Leia doesn’t care about the numbers. She’s thinking about how, in some strange epigenetic way, her daughter’s nightmares come from  _ her _ \- how she could have raised them perfectly and still have them tainted by trauma suffered in her own youth -  and how it must only be amplified by their Force connection.

Her hair’s finished now. Ben’s putting in the last pins. But Leia doesn’t feel like going out anymore; she wants to slink about, recluse in private, lie in bed all day the way she used to when things in her mind got particularly exhausting. She doesn’t have the heart to tell Ben all his work, all their bonding time, is going to be unraveled again.

“When Dad gets home,” she says finally, “we are definitely going to have a talk. Neither of you have to stay anywhere you don’t want to - I do hope you know that, Ben.”

“Yeah,” Ben says. “I know.”

 

Han Solo is getting too old for smuggling, he reckons, sitting in a pub in Coronet City with his usual pint of Corellian whiskey, his usual taped-up bags and boxes of spice and gold and fuel, and a rather unusual feeling of exhaustion and a restlessness that, for once, does not seem to be cured by endless  planet-hopping.

His comlink buzzes and nine hells, it’s his wife. He does some quick math and realizes it’s the middle of the morning on Coruscant - a time when she’s usually knee-deep in files and meetings and diplomatic boringness. She only calls him in the morning if something really, really bad has happened, or if she’s mad.

He picks up.

“H’lo?”

“Han.” Her voice is steady, but a tiny quiver hides beneath it like the smallest trickle of lava awakening in a long-dormant volcano. It seems she is taking every bit of effort not to blow her top completely right now. “We need to talk.”

“What’d I do now,” Han says, trying to lighten the mood. The comlink’s audio-only but he can can practically  _ hear  _ his wife’s lips press together to make that thin, straight pink line of disapproval.

“Breha’s having nightmares.”

“You commed at ten o clock Coruscant time to tell me that our five-year-old is having typical five-year-old problems? Rey’s a tough kid, sweetheart. She’ll live.”

“Why does  _ no one _ call our daughter her given name,” Leia mumbles. “I’ve told you before,  _ Rey _ sounds absolutely ridiculous to Alderaanian ears. It’s the old word for a male monarch, and, in case you haven’t noticed, Breha’s a girl.”

“Sorry, I’ll just go back to having my perfectly fine pronunciation of Breha nitpicked instead,” says Han cheerfully.

“It’s not perfectly fine, and you know it, hotshot.” Han hears her tone soften a little and he breathes a sigh of relief. She pauses. “But...  that wasn’t what I was calling about. Han - they’re not normal nightmares. I don’t want to say too much over a comlink, just in case, but… I think we should take the kids out of Luke’s little ragtag band of padawans. They need to be kids first, and force users second. It’s dangerous.”

“Well, yeah, I’ve been saying that from the beginning,” says Han. “What made you change your mind? A couple nightmares? Or - “

“Han, stop being dense,” Leia says in a measured tone that scares Han more than it would if she was yelling at him. “It’s a lot more than just nightmares. It’s - scaring me.”

Shit, Han thinks, if Leia’s scared, things must be bad. His wife wasn’t scared very easily.

“I love you,” he says, distracted, worried himself, now. “I’ll comm when I’m on my way home, okay?”

“Okay,” Leia agrees. “I love you too. Fly safe.”    
And so far away his wife hangs up. Han’s unsettled, on edge. He often has trouble picking up on the finer tunes of things, like his wife, but even he can tell something is very, very wrong. Even the sign-off: usually Leia’d say something cheeky, the time-honored _I know_ or something discreetly bawdy - but _I love you too_ was too sincere, not guarded enough; it was as if she was scared she would never be able to say it to him again.

He makes his way to the front of the bar and asks for another glass of whiskey. The barkeep’s obviously been observing Han’s conversation, and Han wonders distantly how much he’s heard.

“Fightin’ with the wife?” chuckles the barkeep.

“No,” says Han, a little offended. “This is just how we talk.”

“I don’t think I’d be able to take getting snapped at like that every time I talked to my Shoshana,” says the barkeep. “She must be worth it.”

“Yeah,” says Han. “She is.”

 

Leia’s been extra-protective of Breha in the weeks since Ben’s revelation. She’s kept the little girl in her bed every night, and in her sight every day, taking her into the office when she can. 

“You know,” Ben reminds her, “I can watch her sometimes, if you don’t want the nannies anymore. I watch her all the time at Uncle Luke’s. And I’m handier with the kitchen appliances than you are.”  
“Ouch,” says Leia jokingly. “You didn’t miss my cooking when you’re there, at least, I take it?”

“Not in the slightest,” Ben grins back. It’s so rare, nowadays, that smile - he’s slipping back into the folds of family life, of closeness, when he forgets his Jedi training and can just be her son again. Even if Breha’s nightmares weren’t a factor, she’d probably have doubts about keeping the children there. 

“When I was your age, I’d never made so much as a cup of tea before, you know,” she says. “I always had someone to do it for me. I hope I’ve taught you to be a little more independent than I was.”

Ben frowns. “I hardly think  _ too little independence _ is a problem, Mama,” he says, rage and bitterness a distinct underlying current beneath his nonchalant joking. “I mean, you kind of abandoned us.”

“ _ Mijo _ \- surely you don’t think we sent you to Uncle Luke because we were  _ abandoning  _ you,” moans Leia, dismayed and wracked with shame.

“Funny, you call me that,” says Ben, “yet you never taught me Alderaanian. I don’t know more than a few words of my own mother’s native language.”

“Who would you even use it with,” says Leia softly. 

“Evaan. Winter. Carlist,” Ben rattles off the names of her mother’s few surviving Alderaanian friends and colleagues. “You.”

Leia is silent, biting her lip. She becomes very busy, suddenly, with the silverware she is sorting. The truth is, she feels pretty terrible about all the ways she’s let Alderaanian culture die with her generation, but selfish as it may be, it’s just too painful to bring into her life again. It’s been so much easier to leave Alderaan in the past whenever she can, even though she knows she’s doing the wrong thing.

“Mama,” Ben says suddenly, “why d’you think he did it?”

“Who? Did what?” asks Leia, though she thinks she knows exactly what her son is talking about.

“Alderaan. Why did my grandfather blow up an entire planet, full of innocent people?” His choice in referring to Vader as his grandfather was probably an innocent, if thoughtless, decision, but at that particular instance Leia feels rather like she’s been punched in the gut.

“Because he was a heartless, psychopathic, power-drunk man,” she says, sternly and guardedly, as if implicitly scolding him for the familiarity and sympathy that the words  _ my grandfather _ connoted. “Not even a man. A monster.”

“I know, Mama,” grumbles Ben, clearly guilt-tripped enough; his ears are pink. He backtracks. “But - logically… why would anyone kill a bunch of people, just to  _ prove a point _ ?”

Leia bites her lip hard enough to draw blood. The lingering metallic taste stains her tongue as she struggles to answer, because for once she does not have the answer to one of Ben’s questions.

She remembers, suddenly, a moment from years ago, when Ben still went to school on Coruscant. 

“How was your day, baby,” she’d asked him distractedly over afternoon snack preparations, “anything interesting happen?”

“It was all right. We had a school assembly. This guy who was tortured under the Empire gave a talk.”

“ _ What _ ?”

“Yeah.” Ben struggled to recall the speaker’s name, which had been unfamiliar and foreign - “Chuua Lohrs? Something like that.”

Leia knew of Lohrs; he’d worked in a different faction of the Rebel Alliance, and she didn’t know him personally, but she knew he’d been on the Death Star briefly, before her own time there. 

“I’m curious,” Leia had said - and even now she is proud of herself for how remarkably measured she had sounded, considering she had been experiencing  the distinct sensation of drowning - “as to why your teachers thought that was a remotely appropriate topic to breach to a group of eight-year-olds.”

And then - Leia remembered this part in the most vivid clarity, and later she would look back and wonder if it was the beginning of something bigger - Ben had shrugged.

“It was interesting, I thought. People don’t seem to do things like that anymore, do they?”

“No,” Leia had agreed, softly. “Thanks to people like me, and your daddy, and your Uncle Luke and Titi Winter and everyone else who fought for this era of peace, they don’t. Nowadays, we use… political discourse. Words.”

And he’d frowned and asked her, “how does anything get done, then?”

Now, years later, mother and son stand in the same kitchen and Leia tries again to calm the same strange, nervous feeling she’d had then. 

“I don’t know, baby,” she says, finally, hoarsely. “I don’t know why anyone would do that.”

“I do,” he says quietly, his brown eyes distant, almost vacant. “Sometimes I get - really, really angry. At school - some of the older students - they’re cruel to Breha. She’s so little. And they hurt her.” Leia wonders if a cloud has swallowed up the apartment, or if the sudden shadow and drop in temperature she feels is only a result of the horror and disbelief she’s feeling.

“Hurt her how?”

Ben is digging his ragged nails into his palms, the way he used to when he was upset, when he was really little. “They tease her with the Force, sometimes; I think they like to make her nightmares worse. I think they’re jealous - she’s so young, and so much more powerful than any one of them. But when they do it - I want to hurt them. I don’t act like a Jedi when they hurt the person I care about the most… I’m not strong enough to feel content with peace.”

“Ben,” Leia says slowly, “it’s not a sin to fight against cruelty. I’d hope your dad and I have conveyed that to you, with all the sacrifices we’ve made, with how we chose to live our lives.”

Ben shifts uncomfortably. “It’s not just righteous anger, though, like you and Dad have. I want to fucking  _ punish _ them. I want them to feel the kind of emotional pain they inflict upon my sister.”

Leia is too dazed to chide him for swearing; she’s too dazed to do anything, really, her son’s just told her something still more disturbing about his sister’s life with Luke, and she doesn’t think she’s felt this alone, this hapless and powerless, since - 

“We are taking you home,” she manages, closing her eyes. “You and Breha both. Luke’s little experiment is threatening to - “ she searches for the right words - “ _ mirror  _ the past, rather than correct it.” She is determined, suddenly, sure of herself and her decision as she speaks it.

“I won’t have my children caught in the crosshairs.”

 


End file.
